


To seek another land

by delfina



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:20:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24352003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delfina/pseuds/delfina
Summary: A small slice of a job during which Arthur and Eames come to see each other in a new light.
Relationships: Arthur/Eames (Inception)
Kudos: 37





	To seek another land

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally meant to be the start of something longer, but that’s unlikely to happen now, so… spot the rather sudden wrapping-up.
> 
> The title is, slightly incongruously, from Neruda’s ‘If You Forget Me’: ‘And you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots / Remember / That on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms / And my roots will set off to seek another land.’

If only Richards had lost his touch, it would be easier to turn him down. The trouble was, the jobs were genuinely interesting. Sometimes, like a master diamond-cutter who, with one tap of his hammer, makes the gem cleave into exactly the geometrical shards intended, his clear-headed, instinctive approach solved the difficulty of how to extract the information they sought with a deft sureness. The rest of the time? Arthur sighed and drew a hand over his face. He could hear Richards telling Wosiyane, their architect, a story that Arthur had heard at least twice before. Each time, Richards’s own role in the story was magnified a little more (‘I mean Le Roux just has no concept of how to deal with people, no self-awareness at all. And it’s only because I was there on the day that he was meant to be infiltrating the Italian Embassy in Washington… Luckily I was able to smooth things over…'). He hunched his shoulders into his laptop screen, as if by doing so he could somehow isolate himself and cut off the sound of their extractor’s voice. He focussed on his screen and continued to scan the mark’s emails for an indication of when she might be leaving town: a holiday, work-related travel, even a weekend day trip to London.

The door to the building banged shut. Eames must be back from the M&S attached to the nearby petrol station where he had gone on the sandwich run. They were on the outskirts of Oxford in what had previously been a greenhouse - before that some sort of farm building, was Arthur’s guess – not far from the retail park in which Isis BioTech had its research facility. Their mark, Dr Goodman, otherwise a fellow at Keble College and lecturer in the Medical Sciences Division, was heading a secretive new project, and Innova Med Corp were keen enough to learn about it that they had hired Richards to find out.

‘Thanks’, said Arthur absent-mindedly as Eames set down his egg-and-cress-on-wholemeal on the desk along with a coffee.

‘Don’t mention it, I don’t _mind_ being the tea-wallah around here’, Eames murmured as he moved on. The comment made Arthur look up at the other man, but before he could formulate a question, Eames was quirking his lips in a way that suggested he was more amused than annoyed.

| | |

An hour later, Arthur could tell that he _was_ getting annoyed. They were still in the brainstorming stages and Eames had made a small suggestion based on a job he had worked eighteen months ago. Richards had immediately dismissed the idea. When Eames had tried to explain why his point was in fact relevant, the extractor had become increasingly aggressive and rude. Uncomfortable, Arthur and Wosiyane were both pretending to be absorbed in their own work, but the shock that Arthur felt at Richards’s words and tone was such that the air around him seemed to be ringing in his ears. He didn’t know what had happened exactly. He knew that Richards had been Eames’s mentor many years ago, that at the time Eames had been the golden boy, could do no wrong. But Richards’s favour was a fickle thing, and now it seemed Eames was perpetually in the firing line.

‘Oh, yes,’ Richards’s voice dripped sarcasm. ‘Tell me how to do my job. You haven’t a clue what you’re talking about! You’re not an extractor, you’re a forger. What do you know about these things? Nothing!’

Eames paused and took a deliberate breath. ‘I think I’m going to leave now for a bit, since it doesn’t seem as though we're making much headway here.’ He got up from his chair.

‘Yes, that’s right, because you have fuck all to say except some rubbish about Goodman's colleague from Warwick. Yes, run away as soon as someone disagrees with you.’

Even at this distance, Arthur could tell that Eames was vibrating with anger as he walked with dignity to the door and let it close behind him. The silence in his wake was heavy, and Arthur was left trying to process what he had just witnessed. It was as he stared at the door that he saw Eames’s coat on the back of a chair and realised that the forger had not taken it with him. On the one hand, he was hesitant to draw attention to himself. On the other, he desperately wanted to leave the poisonous atmosphere of the greenhouse too. Coming to an abrupt decision, Arthur got to his feet and strode towards the door, pulling on his own coat before grabbing Eames’s. Muttering under his breath, ‘forgot his coat and it’s pretty cold out,’ and not waiting to hear any replies that might have been forthcoming, he stepped outside into the November afternoon.

His first thought was to look for the car, but it was there and Eames was not inside it. He began to walk around the building, expecting to see the forger with a cigarette, perhaps, leaning against the wall of the greenhouse. But no, and then, just as he started to turn back, a movement caught his eye. There was a small dilapidated shed off to one side, and Eames was standing next to it, looking off into the fields beyond. Arthur changed course to approach the other man. His footsteps didn’t make much noise on the grass, so, to avoid startling Eames, when he was a few feet away, he paused.

‘Hey, you forgot your coat.’ Apart from a movement of the shoulders, this elicited no reaction, so Arthur carried on and stood next to him. ‘Don’t want you to –’ he started to say, and then stopped as he saw the contorted expression on Eames’s face. Arthur immediately turned away again, but he was stunned. Not knowing what to do, he unfolded the coat and laid it over the man’s back. His hand hovered as he tried to decide whether to stay or to leave Eames his privacy. He was on the verge of retreating when Eames’s head dropped and he spoke.

‘Sorry.’ It was wrenched out through bitterly clenched teeth.

‘What? Don’t apologise.’

’No, I’m.’ A shuddering breath. ‘Dammit, I don’t want him to be able to do this to me.’

‘Hey,’ Arthur pulled the forger around to face him and then into a tight hug, clapping him a few times on the back in what he hoped was coming across as manly solidarity. ‘He was being a dick. You were nothing but calm and reasonable. But you shouldn’t take it this seriously.’

‘Believe me, I know.’ A bitter laugh, some rough breaths. Arthur hung on and tried to radiate supportiveness. He and Eames had always had very different styles, but that didn’t mean he didn’t appreciate the man’s many qualities. And a generally pleasant demeanour, alongside good ideas and utter dependability, were hard to beat. If Arthur had occasionally in the past been a bit sour about Eames, it had had more to do with his own deep fatigue and perhaps a slight feeling of being eclipsed by a more talented colleague. In the last year or so he had realised that Eames wasn’t seeking to upstage anyone, that what delighted him was to dabble and flit from one milieu to the next, and they had settled into a more relaxed and friendly rapport.

‘I’ll bet he only does it ’cause he’s jealous of you, you know.’ 

‘Jealous of _me_? What the blazes?’ Eames was easing away now, searching through his pockets – presumably for a tissue – in the end he wiped his face on his shirt-sleeve before slipping into the jacket properly.

‘You’re young, still a rising star, but established enough that he now sees you as a threat. I should know,’ Arthur huffed out a small laugh, ‘I used to feel something like that myself, but I got over it.’

‘You?’

‘Well,’ Arthur looked down, a bit embarrassed. ‘Why do you think I used to be so aloof, borderline hostile for so long?’

‘Because you’re a standoffish git with no social graces to speak of?’

‘Hey now,’ Arthur directed a playful punch at Eames’s shoulder, then laughed a bit, letting his hand linger. It was a nice shoulder as shoulders went, he noted, a bit distractedly. Eames smiled weakly at him, back on a more even keel now.

They stood there for a few seconds, wondering what came next. Arthur looked past Eames at the fields. He could see the appeal, at a moment like this, of just taking off through the grass, over the hills in the distance. Well, that wasn’t an option just now, but…

‘You know what, let’s go to The Swan and bitch about Richards. Or other people.’

‘What, now? In the middle of a working day?’ Eames looked genuinely scandalised. For all his cultivated nonchalance, his work ethic was tremendous, Arthur knew.

‘Yeah, come on, it sends a clear message.’ Arthur began to walk towards the road.

‘But our things are –’

‘We’ll be back tomorrow morning.’

He heard Eames jog a few steps to catch up with him. ‘And we’d have to cross the by-pass on foot.’

Arthur turned back and raised an eyebrow. ‘We’ve done worse in the dreamscape.’

‘Yes, but – goodness, Arthur, I don’t think I’ll be able to see you in quite the same light ever again.’

Arthur half turned again and gave a slightly wild grin. ‘Good.’

| | |

And if it was irksome that for the rest of the job Richards took to referring to him as Eames’s ‘knight in shining armour’, Arthur reflected that, on balance, there were very many worse things he could be.


End file.
